Grief in a Cocktail Glass.

Saturday night.
A warm blur of music, clinking glasses, and half-shouted laughter over a crowded bar table. The kind of night where you forget what time it is and just enjoy being alive, surrounded by people you love, faces glowing under dim amber lights.

We were a group of five—old friends, new ones, my boyfriend’s hand resting lightly on my thigh, everything normal.

I spilled my drink everywhere. Someone else made a joke that had us all doubled over. For once, I let myself relax. I laughed from my chest. I felt light. For a moment, I forgot the heaviness I carry.

And then the conversation shifted.

“I could never have a baby in my early twenties,” one of the girls said, wrinkling her nose as she sipped her drink. “Like… no way. That’s when you’re supposed to be selfish.”

Everyone nodded, chimed in. “Yeah, that would ruin everything,” someone added. “Traveling, careers, dating—it’d be over.”

And I got quiet.

Because while they were laughing about dodging motherhood like a bullet, I was sitting with the fact that I never even got to aim.
There’s no bullet to dodge when the choice is already gone.
My early twenties won’t include that decision—or any version of that future.
No accidental pregnancy.
No surprise joy.
No agonizing over timing.
Just absence.

Just never.

I zoned out of the conversation. Eyes fixed on the little puddle of condensation under my glass. My chest started to tighten the way it does when the tears start to rise but have nowhere to go.

My boyfriend noticed.
He always does.

He leaned in and whispered, “Want to take a walk?”
I nodded, and we slipped away from the table.

We found a quiet room in the bar, barely lit, just far enough from the bar to muffle the sound of joy. And then I broke.
Bent at the waist.
Hands over my face.
Sobbing into the night air.

He didn’t say anything. He just held me.

Because there are no words when you’re grieving something everyone else still gets to take for granted.
No language for mourning a choice that was stolen before you even had the maturity to want it.
Just silence. And shaking. And the hum of a world that moves on.

Eventually, I gathered myself.
Fixed my makeup in the reflection of a shitty bathroom window, with a curtain as stall doors.
Tucked the grief back under my ribs where it usually lives.
And walked back with him like nothing happened.

We sat down again. I smiled, picked up my drink, tried to catch the tail end of a conversation about someone’s upcoming birthday.

Then someone looked at me—eyes wide with guilt—and blurted, “Oh my God. I’m so, so, so sorry. I didn’t know.”

And in that moment, it got worse.
Because now it wasn’t just my pain—I had become the pain in the room.
The one they’d tiptoe around. The one who makes things awkward without saying a word.

I smiled warmly and shook my head. “It’s fine. Really.”

But it wasn’t.

For the rest of the night, I drank to forget.
To feel loose again.
To remember what it was like before every conversation had the power to shatter me.

We laughed again. We danced. We got mozzarella sticks late at night..
But I carried the heaviness home like a purse I couldn’t put down.

That night, I learned how joy and grief can share the same bar stool.
How you can be surrounded by love and still feel completely alone.
How you can lose something you never even had—and still mourn it like it was real.

Because for me, it was.